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When 20-Year-Old Bill Gates Fought the 'Thieves' Who Stole His First Code

posted by hubie on Wednesday February 04, @09:16AM   
from the Road-Ahead dept.

oaklandwatch writes:

As the world's first home computers appeared in 1975, Bill Gates -- then 20 years old -- screamed that "Most of you steal your software..." (Gates had coded the operating system for Altair's first home computer with Paul Allen and Monte Davidoff -- only to see it pirated by Steve Wozniak's friends at the Homebrew Computing Club.) Expecting royalties, a none-too-happy Gates issued his letter in the club's newsletter (as well as Altair's own publication), complaining "I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up."

Freedom-loving coders had other ideas. When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs released their Apple 1 home computer that summer, they stressed that "our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost..." And the earliest open-source hackers began writing their own free Tiny Basic interpreters to create a free alternative to the Gates/Micro-Soft code. (This led to the first occurrence of the phrase "Copyleft" in October of 1976.)

Open Source definition author Bruce Perens shares his thoughts today. "When I left Pixar in 2000, I stopped in Steve Job's office — which for some reason was right across the hall from mine... " Perens remembered. "I asked Steve: 'You still don't believe in this Linux stuff, do you...?'" And Perens remembers how 30 years later, that movement finally won over Steve Jobs.

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Original Submission

• Re:Of course their perspective changedRe:Of course their perspective changed (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:28PM (2 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @04:28PM (#1432531)

  " With "copy left" you have to build a hardware business"

  Bullshit.
  No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure
  is what the world runs on now.

  Eventually, the OS that Cutler built will rot from AI slop, but no one will care
  because no value can be made from operating systems infrastructure.

  Parent

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• Write-only kernelWrite-only kernel (Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday February 04, @05:10PM (1 child)

  by canopic jug (3949) on Wednesday February 04, @05:10PM (#1432539) Journal

  No one writes their own OS any more. Linux and that whole "free" infrastructure

  It's rare but there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up, like ST-DOS [sininenankka.dy.fi] with its lEEt/OS GUI [sininenankka.dy.fi]. That's a one-man team.

  Then there are bigger projects like Haiku OS [haiku-os.org]. Even old, formerly moribund projects like Hurd are seeing a revival. Those are likely caused by people seeing the writing on the wall for Linux. It has not seen culling and refactoring like the kernels for some of the BSDs have. The result is that it gets bigger and bigger with more cruft and more legacy code.

  However, while the kernel is one thing, coming up with a new user space is a whole different matter. In that regards there is basically only a choice between GNU and the BSDs.

  --
  Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.

  Parent

  • Re:Write-only kernel(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @08:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 04, @08:16PM (#1432568)

    "there are a number of simpler operating systems coming up"

    Toys.

    Apple failed in the 90s writing a modern operating system because doing all the grunt work
    is hard, and there isn't enough payback for even their NIH.

    Parent